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Technically, this should be "technology Monday, but oh well. here's our story today- and actually the title is quite serious- from Yahoo News:
Gamer uses virtual training to save lives
My reaction was initially twofold: 1) "Gee it's nice that gamers get good press for once", and 2) "Gee, that could have so easily gone wrong". But after a bit, I got to thinking about this in a bit more depth. the important point in this article isn't that a gamer used virtual training to save lives, but that the game actually used highly useful virtual training.
You see, back in the 1980s, one of the Big Things that was being touted about Virtual Reality (and computers in general) was that VR training was right around the corner, and was going to supplant standard learning methods. In the 90s we were going to be going into classrooms, putting on our VR goggles, and running through video-game style scenarios that would teach us anythng without the need for teachers. It's interesting to me that one of the elements of computer applications that seems to have fallen somewhat by the wayside is virtual training. Not that computers aren't being used for learning and training; distance learning has largely migrated over to online courses. And of course airplane, tank and medical simulators are common. But the development of a whole new style of learning has been much slower than other computer applications.
Perhaps one of the things that needed to be accomplished before virtual training could take off was improving the quality of the VR reality to get acceptable levels of fidelity. Also MMORPGs in creating flexible, open-ended scenarios was probably useful- II don't think it was a coincidence this story came out of America's Army. All this being the case, one may expect that in the last few years, more and more VR learning applications would be coming out, and indeed that seems to be the case. Which means we may yet be "right around the corner" from an explosion of VR training applications. Now, if they could only manage to miniaturize the damn VR goggles to a usable size...
Any thoughts?
Gamer uses virtual training to save lives
My reaction was initially twofold: 1) "Gee it's nice that gamers get good press for once", and 2) "Gee, that could have so easily gone wrong". But after a bit, I got to thinking about this in a bit more depth. the important point in this article isn't that a gamer used virtual training to save lives, but that the game actually used highly useful virtual training.
You see, back in the 1980s, one of the Big Things that was being touted about Virtual Reality (and computers in general) was that VR training was right around the corner, and was going to supplant standard learning methods. In the 90s we were going to be going into classrooms, putting on our VR goggles, and running through video-game style scenarios that would teach us anythng without the need for teachers. It's interesting to me that one of the elements of computer applications that seems to have fallen somewhat by the wayside is virtual training. Not that computers aren't being used for learning and training; distance learning has largely migrated over to online courses. And of course airplane, tank and medical simulators are common. But the development of a whole new style of learning has been much slower than other computer applications.
Perhaps one of the things that needed to be accomplished before virtual training could take off was improving the quality of the VR reality to get acceptable levels of fidelity. Also MMORPGs in creating flexible, open-ended scenarios was probably useful- II don't think it was a coincidence this story came out of America's Army. All this being the case, one may expect that in the last few years, more and more VR learning applications would be coming out, and indeed that seems to be the case. Which means we may yet be "right around the corner" from an explosion of VR training applications. Now, if they could only manage to miniaturize the damn VR goggles to a usable size...
Any thoughts?